12/02/2009 @ 5:00PM

Eating Alone

Table for one? Join the club. Gone are the days when women would rather skip a meal than sit solo through dinner, especially in public. Instead, hectic workdays, hard-to-coordinate family schedules, myriad convenience foods and a restaurant culture that now courts single diners have made eating alone not just acceptable, but commonplace.

According to the 2006 American Time Use Survey, 58% of people in the U.S. regularly eat on their own. Another survey, from Kelton Research, a national polling firm, in 2008, found that three out of four American adults take their meals alone at least occasionally. Additionally, two-thirds said they’d prefer to eat dinner in their pajamas on the couch rather than have a fancy meal at a restaurant.

Women may have adjusted to eating by themselves, but that doesn’t mean that they’re feasting on the same fare they would with friends or family. “When you’re by yourself, no one’s there to judge you if you decide that a bowl of Fruit Loops and a pot pie with ketchup will be your dinner for the evening,” says Susan Fisher, Ph.D., a professor of food and nutrition at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.

It’s also easy to not pay attention to what you’re eating when you’re, say, watching television or catching up on e-mail, points out Brian Wansink, Ph.D., director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. “When people are alone, they may be more prone to have an “eating bout,” which is a single episode where you eat three times more than you normally would. It’s not so much a dysfunction as something that almost everyone has done at one time or another. You’re not paying attention, or there’s no one else to give you social cues to stop eating, and you end up overdoing it.”

Unlike binge eating disorder, it’s not that an eating bout leads to thousands of excess calories in one sitting; but even an excess of 300 to 400 adds up, given that it takes just 3,500 extra calories to put on a pound. “It’s a big reason why people end up gaining weight,” says Wansink.

Another health trap that people who eat alone–whether at home, in the office, on the road or at a restaurant–tend to fall into is wolfing down food. “When you dine with others, you converse with them, which provides the opportunity to slow down and savor your food,” says Marisa Moore, R.D., a national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “That’s important, because it takes around 20 minutes for your brain to register that your stomach is full. Eat too fast and you’ll miss those cues entirely.” To wit: A recent study from the University of Rhode Island found that women who ate a pasta meal over the course of half an hour consumed 67 fewer calories than women who consumed the same meal in just nine minutes.

Perhaps the overarching issue is that many women downgrade their entire attitude about eating if they’re not with others, says former chef Deborah Madison. In her recent book, What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Madison spoke with hundreds of people about their solo dining habits. “After the first 100 times someone gloated over some weird dish, I found it a little depressing … to think that people couldn’t or wouldn’t rise to the occasion of providing more of a [proper] meal for themselves. When a woman would finally talk about how she loved to use her solo meals as a time to experiment, or that she set the table, poured a glass of wine and enjoyed that time, I just wanted to jump up and down with joy.” Ultimately, says Madison, making the effort to feed yourself well “is about self-respect.”

The thing is, “It doesn’t take that much time or prep work to make a healthier, better-tasting meal for one,” says Moore. She advises skipping processed fare (think frozen dinners or Ramen cups) and saving hundreds of calories and dozens of grams of fat in the process by cooking for yourself (see slide show for ideas). Just make sure to double-check your portions. “In a recent study, we asked 100 people who wanted to lose weight to make themselves hot oatmeal each day. Oatmeal’s a very healthy, filling food–so we were surprised to find that the typical study participant actually gained 8/10ths of a pound,” says Wansink. “When we dug deeper, we discovered they were making more than one serving of oatmeal at a time because it seemed silly to make just a little. Then they ended up eating some of that extra oatmeal, which led to weight gain.”

It’s OK to make a larger dish: “Just be sure to portion out and freeze individual servings right away so you’re not tempted to overeat,” advises Wansink. But perhaps the best thing you can do for yourself, says Fisher, is “stop making eating just another to-do on your list. If you view it as a pleasurable event, you’ll be more inclined to make healthful choices.”

Camille Noe Pagan is a New York City-based journalist and co-founder of SvelteGourmand.com.

ForbesWoman Asks: Do you find yourself eating alone more than you’d like? What’s your private go-to menu, and where do you tend to dine?